CHAPTER 14
With the trial behind us, and Lee on location in Florida filming The Norseman, Farrah and I went to Cannes. Mel Simon’s people had arranged for Husband to be screened in France, although it wasn’t in the competition. The idea was to sell the movie to distributors and expose Farrah to the world as a big-screen actress. I had never been to the festival. I haven’t been back since; a return would have been anticlimactic.
Farrah was a model turned television actress turned celebrity star turned phenomenon. She was the festival’s biggest attraction since Brigitte Bardot in 1956. It took us three hours to get through the crowd at Nice. Then we motored to Cannes, where we drove through backstreets and alleys until we arrived at a small villa in a clump of villas in the hills above the town. Mel had taken care of everything, which included five security guards for Farrah.
I don’t remember the exact schedule—it was five days of hectic activity—but before we arrived in Cannes proper, we went to a party on Stavros Niarchos’s yacht. I had met Niarchos in Africa with Bill Holden and I would meet him a third time with Suzanne Somers. His yacht was spectacular, so big that a helicopter sitting on its pad looked like a speck. It was a floating hotel laden with art, including the famous Andy Warhol painting of Elvis Presley hanging over Stavros’s screening-room door. Unfortunately, Farrah became seasick.
With rare exception, I did not get involved romantically with clients. I had not lied to Charlotte Rampling, but Cannes was different. It was so romantic in the hills overlooking the city that I considered making a play for Farrah. We had our own little villa with a fireplace and candles flickering like fireflies in the night. As I watched her glide about, I could hardly keep myself at bay. At last, however, my head won out over my heart. I refrained from making a move because I wanted Farrah to continue thinking I was the smartest person alive. If I made a move and failed (and I’m sure I would have), I would be reduced in her eyes to a stupid dreamer.
Being at Cannes meant you had to attend a screening at the Palais des Festivals. We were told explicitly, “If Farrah doesn’t go to the Palais, we will never show a film of hers, ever.”
It was not an idle threat. An official said, “Raquel Welch didn’t go, and her films were thereafter barred.” It was tacit, but a law nevertheless. When you accept the invitation, you are expected to participate. We went to the Palais.
I don’t remember what was being screened; it made no difference. I should have realized something eventful was on the horizon from the elaborate planning that went into our traffic route. We changed cars four times, so we wouldn’t be followed.
We drove first to the Carlton Hotel, where Mel’s people had reserved a suite of rooms. While Farrah was getting ready, I went to the casino to rid myself of some money. As I was returning to Farrah’s suite, I ran into Robin Leach and invited him to join us.
The invitation was a mistake. When Farrah saw Robin, she picked up the only handy item (a banana, fortunately) and threw it. Bingo! She hit him in the forehead. Then she began to curse him for a story he had written in the Star. The incident presaged a night of horrors.
Finally we went to the theater. Thousands were waiting on the sidewalk and street in front of the Palais. José Eber, Farrah’s hairdresser, was with us. He was so intimidated that he wouldn’t get out of the limousine: “It’s too dangerous!”
I looked at Farrah. Fear was written on her face too. But we had to make an appearance, so I edged the door open. The crowd fell back, and I helped Farrah out. We took only two steps before the crowd swarmed us like bees at a hive. Frantic, Farrah turned back to the limousine. “Oh, my God!” she cried. “It’s gone!”
It wasn’t. The throng that encircled us camouflaged it. We had been promised police protection, but the cops seemed scant. In fact, the entire Cannes force was on duty, all seventy-eight of them! The horde was simply too great for the meager force to contain, although they tried gallantly.
We edged toward the theater like snails. Somehow the police formed a cordon around us. Behind them were the paparazzi, and behind the photographers were the fans, thousands from around the globe, pressing toward us. When we reached the steps leading up to the theater, I thought we were home free. Then it happened. The crowd surged, the paparazzi fell forward, and the police line broke. Tiers of people began to fall upon each other, pushed by the weight of the crowd behind them. A vise was closing. I tried to shield Farrah with my body, and was hit in the head by a camera. It was scary, like a scene from The Day of the Locust.
At last the cops managed to form a line in front of us and a line behind us, moving us inch by inch until we reached an elevator. The door opened and they shoved us in. We stayed caged until they cleared the gallery of spectators from the actual theater entrance; then they came for us and escorted us into the lobby of the Palais.
During the screening I made arrangements for us to exit the theater through a back door. For once the festival officials didn’t stick to protocol. They agreed, and we had a heavy police escort back to the Carlton.
The next day a police captain came to see me. “Please, we hope you won’t say anything about the incident last night,” he said.
I had no intention of saying anything, but I was surprised to be sought out, considering that hundreds of journalists and photographers had been present. It turned out that several people had been crushed and killed. “If it gets out,” said the policeman, “no one will want to come to Cannes.”
Lee finished The Norseman and went straight to Brazil to make Killer Fish, an exploitation movie I put together with Carlo Ponti, who was supposed to produce it. Again, I got Lee $400,000 and a piece of the action. It was filmed in a terrible place named Angra dos Reis. The whole episode was tragic, but Lee wanted to be in movies. Without Lee and the supporting cast—Margaux Hemingway, Marisa Berenson and Karen Black—the movie would never have gotten off the ground.
The minute I returned from France, Lee was on the phone. “Carlo Ponti didn’t show up,” he said. “He sent his son, who doesn’t even go to the set. The director can’t speak a word of English, only Italian. The cast speaks English, but the fucking crew only speaks Portuguese. This is one fucking mess. Get your ass down here!”
Reluctantly, I went. It was mid-May. I hopped a plane with a bag of California spring-summer clothes, not considering that Brazil was on the other side of the equator, where winter had firmly set in. It was the beginning of the worst movie experience of my life. When I arrived, the wind-chill factor pushed the thermometer to near zero. My first thought as I walked across the tarmac was, “I’ve got to get out of here, fast!” But Lee wouldn’t let me leave. I had to do everything, ranging the gamut from production designer to production manager.
Angra dos Reis was a hellhole. En route to the set one day, we passed a downed horse in the patchwork road. It had broken legs. When I went back to the hotel in the afternoon, the horse was still there, suffering from its wound. A week later, it was still there.
I couldn’t handle it. After three weeks, I said, “That’s it. I’m out of here.” I had a good excuse. Back in Los Angeles, some friends were throwing a birthday bash for me. I packed my bags, offered everybody my condolences and farewells, and started for the airport with a driver. For some reason I felt uneasy—something was amiss. Then I discovered I didn’t have my passport. We turned around and drove back to the hotel. I told Lee about my passport.
“I know,” he said. Obviously, he had it.
“Where is it? I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” I said.
He wouldn’t tell me. “If I have to stay here, then you have to stay here.” It was a sick joke, but I stayed until the movie wrapped.
Farrah and Lee weren’t the only thoroughbreds in my stable. I had Suzanne and Kristy, Robert Conrad, Jennifer O’Neill and Susan Saint James, among others. In total I had eleven management clients. Victor French was another one, but he was going through a divorce, which was all he could talk about. He was constantly depressed, which depressed me. I got tired of being depressed, so I persuaded him to get another manager.
I had high hopes for Jennifer O’Neill, though. She was the first “10.” I had first represented her as a publicist, thinking she could become the next superstar. Summer of ’42 was her vehicle, the story of a young woman falling in love with a kid. It made Jennifer a star, a sex symbol, but then she fell in love for real and disappeared in Europe. She was gone too long to capitalize on her stardom. Timing is everything.
Bo Derek, a beautiful woman whom I did not represent, was the second “10,” but the nomenclature stuck with her. She got it from the movie of the same name, the idea of which was taken from Summer of ’42. It was a switch on the ages—an older guy and a young girl instead of an older woman and a young guy.
A few years after the success of Summer, Jennifer returned to her ranch in the South. I helped her get a Disney picture called The Black Hole. She rented out her ranch and her horses and all the things she loved because the movie was going to take a long time to shoot. She came to California and leased a house. Then the geniuses at Disney decided she should have her beautiful long hair cut off, although anyone with even a pretension to recognize beauty knew it was a mistake. She cried as they cut her hair.
She had a meeting with her agent and business manager at the old Gaiety on Sunset. It was a long meeting. Driving home, she ran into a parked car and was injured. An ambulance took her to Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where she was put in intensive care. I wanted to be the first to send her flowers and a card, but Disney beat me to it; they managed to check her blood count for alcohol. The home of Mickey Mouse and Goofy and Bambi sent her a pink slip. Walt was dead, and the management of the studio was now under Michael Eisner, the guy who later gave Michael Ovitz $100 million for working one year.
When she got out of the hospital, Jennifer sued Disney, which was like suing the U.S. Treasury Department because you don’t like the look of a penny. Disney doesn’t have a whole floor of lawyers for nothing. She never got a dime. Eisner replaced her in The Black Hole with Yvette Mimieux, who should have been a professor at Harvard.
Disney, the house that Walt built, had become a corporation interested solely in the bottom line.
By summer 1978, Suzanne Somers was a bona fide star. Three’s Company was the hottest sitcom on the air and she had evolved into a comedic phenomenon. She made the covers of TV Guide and People, benchmarks for Hollywood celebrities. Now she wanted to be a movie star, but without the preamble most actresses experience in their climb up the ladder of success. I received no movie offers for her, and the projects Farrah didn’t want were not suitable for Suzanne’s talent. Finally I found a little “beach” picture that was already packaged with the exception of the star. It was a TV movie called Zuma Beach. One of the producers was Brian Grazer; the co-writer was John Carpenter, and the supporting cast included Rosanna Arquette, Tanya Roberts, Timothy Hutton, Delta Burke, Perry Lang and Parker Stevenson, young unknowns with talent. Suzanne complained there were no stars in the cast. “That’s because you are the star,” I told her.
The movie was a piece of television fluff, but it would be her first starring role, something she’d dreamed about all her life. Yet she was hesitant, primarily because Alan Hamel (whom she had now married) thought she should be in a major motion picture with a top-of-the-line director, seasoned stars and a cast of thousands. Alan equated television stardom with movie stardom, a mistake I had already experienced with Somebody Killed Her Husband. And Suzanne, for all her popularity, was not on the iconic level of Farrah.
“There weren’t any stars in American Graffiti either,” I reminded her. “But now almost everyone associated with the film are stars: George Lucas, Francis Coppola, Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss, Harrison Ford and you.”
Ultimately Suzanne was persuaded, not by me but by the money. The fee I negotiated was more than all of her previous paychecks combined. After Zuma Beach, I got her another TV movie, Happily Ever After, co-starring Bruce Boxleitner, another unknown. It was filmed in Palm Springs.
Suzanne was inexperienced, but she was intuitive. Her hairdresser, who’d been at the studio for thirty years, put her hair up in a beehive. Suzanne didn’t feel right about it, but she was afraid to tell the hairdresser she didn’t think it worked for her character. It gnawed at her; on the third day of shooting she went to the producer and told him she was uncomfortable with the coif. She was too inexperienced to realize it was too late, that her character had already been established on film, and the cost of changing the hairstyle and reshooting her scenes was prohibitive. The producer shunted her complaint aside. “Oh, it looks great!” he told her.
Disappointed, Suzanne lowered her head. The man was wearing unmatched colored socks. She thought, “How would this guy know about hairstyles? Look how he dresses!”
Suzanne was learning. When she told me about the experience, I gave her some advice. “Use your gut instinct,” I said. “Don’t depend on others, especially someone who started in the system with Thomas Edison. When you think something is awry, speak your mind immediately but diplomatically.”
Before Happily Ever After was completed, I closed a deal at CBS for Suzanne to cohost a TV extravaganza in Guadalajara, Mexico, with John Ritter. I don’t remember the bottom line, but Suzanne received something like $50,000, a low-end fee because of the company’s “favored nations” relationship with John. In other words, they couldn’t pay Suzanne more than they paid John, and John’s deal was set in concrete.
In lieu of money, I asked for perks for Suzanne. The network execs looked at me as if I were crazy. Movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor got perks. But television stars? No way! Just for the hell of it, I stuck to my guns. They agreed to fly Suzanne from Palm Springs to Guadalajara in a private jet. Anything else? “Yeah, I want the plane to be green, Suzanne’s favorite color.”
Farrah flew in the Fabergé jet, the most glamorous private plane in the world. Suzanne was afraid of flying, but a plane like the Fabergé jet was enticing. When her transport arrived at Palm Springs, however, it was a small (although beautiful forest green) Learjet. Suzanne developed a case of the nerves. She got on the plane and off the plane. She wanted a jumbo. Alan didn’t help. He kept saying, “Suzanne, if you’re scared, you don’t have to go.” Of course she did have to go; we had a contract to fulfill. I urged her to get back on the plane, but every time she seemed willing, Alan threw a wrench: “Honey, if you’re upset, you don’t have to board.” It was the first but not the last time he worked to turn Suzanne against me.
Finally I persuaded her to get on the plane, and we flew off to Guadalajara.
I was still anathema at ABC, which was stupid on their part. I was managing stars, not wannabes, and stars were known commodities. Greed is ever present in Hollywood, and I’ve known few executives who wouldn’t pursue a star if given the opportunity. I saw the guys at ABC as flapjacks, one pancake short of a stack. Farrah wasn’t the only star I managed, and two of them had series at ABC—Kristy and Suzanne. The network should have been answering my phone calls. I didn’t take being rebuffed by fat-cat executives lightly. I thought it over and came up with an idea unique in the annals of television. I called it the “network crossover.”
I discussed it with Suzanne and Kristy’s mother. After they agreed with my plan, I met with Bud Grant, president of CBS Entertainment. I had to act fast and secretly. I did, making exclusive deals for Suzanne and Kristy, both still under series contract with ABC, for CBS projects during hiatus. The cruncher, though, was CBS’s promise of a series for each actress after their ABC shows—Three’s Company and Family—ran their courses. As I recall, Kristy got a million-dollar contract, more money than her mother had ever dreamed of. Suzanne got $3 million.
When the deal became news, the ABC hierarchy had near coronaries. Never before had anyone taken two hot network properties to another network. It was a first, but I was playing a dangerous game. ABC network executives were power players, although most suffered tunnel vision. They were tied into now, not into tomorrow. It was during this period that Aaron Spelling, often my enemy, paid me a supreme compliment: “Jay has chutzpah, but he also has a first-rate mind.”
Years later, after Alan Hamel effectively brought Suzanne’s television career to an end by making outrageous demands, Suzanne wrote a book in which she criticized my CBS deal. She said I did it for money. I laughed. Of course I did it for money! And I remember how happy she was to get it.
I’m often asked what happened to Kristy McNichol. After I propelled her into the limelight, a man named Jerry Zeitman went to Carollyne McNichol with a proposal. Up to that time, I had been everything for Kristy—manager, agent and publicist. Zeitman said he would manage Kristy for free if Carollyne would enter into a production partnership with him, explaining that they would henceforth control Kristy’s productions and share equally in the huge but unforeseen profits. The main thrust of his argument was to get rid of me: “Why pay Bernstein 15 percent, when I will do the same thing for free?”
It was probably not a difficult decision for Carollyne. People often think they can duplicate the efforts of professionals without realizing what is involved. Furthermore, I had a problem with Kristy’s brother, an actor who wanted me to represent him. When I wouldn’t, he became a Gatling gun of negative verbiage aimed at me. At any rate, I was fired, Zeitman took over, and now, when people ask me what happened to Kristy, I answer them honestly: “I don’t know.”